Relationship between athletic identity and personality in competitive sport

Abstract

Brewer, VanRaalte and Linder (1993) suggest the importance of studying the athlete’ personality to understanding athletic identity. Thus, the aim of this article focuses on studying the influence of the big 5 personality traits, together with age, gender and competitive level in athletic identity. Therefore, we used 215 participants from various sports and competitive levels. We use three measuring instruments, AIMS-plus, for athletic identity, the NEO-FFI-20 for 5 personality traits and a questionnaire to collect sociodemographic data of athletes built for this purpose. The results show the personality trait extraversion and competitive level as the only two determinants of athletic identity.